Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Acclaimed Auteur can serve as a source of pride and pressure. On the favorable side, it can provide a shield: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, auteurist critics may feel pressured to defend even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still more valuable than the best work of a routine filmmaker.) One downside is that such honorifics can restrict a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project doesn't spark is all the greater. A prominent test case has just reached Netflix in the latest from Bigelow A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if feedback from movie enthusiasts are any guide – seems nailed on for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To determine why the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a series of expansive, limber genre pics: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the epic vampire tale Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the classic action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, informed by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the perils of rejecting actuality to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more alert to this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her the United States – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be drawn towards Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would vigorously back a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One idea for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific Ocean by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and alerted to the presidential command center, traveling to what everyone learns is its destination: the heart of Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this two-hour film can possibly go once the timer expires.
The answer – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the perspectives of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ general, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. From a narrative standpoint, the film fails to progress: it’s a two-hour movie with fewer than 20 minutes of plot, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass trowelling on debated technical details while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her best films as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the inciting incident is also the endgame; the narrative captivates at the very second the film ends. The figures are left wondering: “Is this the end?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation spins in ever decreasing circles, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the cinema display, Dynamite struck the eye as flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings employing identical backdrops, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist fades away, so too does Bigelow the Renowned Feminist Director: Rebecca Ferguson, introduced in that initial segment as possibly one more of this director’s tough-minded working women, clocks off early, so again it’s up to a group of serious male figures to try to avert global catastrophe. The verve Bigelow contributed to her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s box office disappointment, the film-maker felt she had to restrain her experimental tendencies, but a script this verbose required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
The Core Fear and Final Analysis
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a artist's anxiety of being considered inadequate; stiffening and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s not unexpected the film should have been surpassed by recent, recontextualising events. What this story presumes is that those occupying positions of operational authority would be trained specialists, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in late 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where earlier Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a pair of lethargic hours clawing futilely outdated. It’s not tense for a reason: even before the rogue missile first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film describes has been shattered completely.
